Data traffic on networks, particularly on the Internet, has increased dramatically over the past several years, and this trend will continue with the rapid growth of e-commerce and other services on the Internet requiring greater bandwidth. With this increase in data traffic on networks, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of computer equipment rooms, known as “server rooms,” used to house the equipment necessary to support data traffic routing. Furthermore, the increasing dependency of companies on their Internet presence has created an urgency to keep the server rooms up and running at all times. Industry estimates show that there are over 400,000 such rooms currently in existence in the United States.
The growth in Internet traffic has prompted many businesses to construct a server room to allow their employees to access Internet information or enable e-commerce and store data. Once viewed as a goal, continuous server up time has become a necessity. Keeping track of numerous computers, along with associated bridges, routers, backup power supplies, etc., can be a formidable task. A large company with server rooms in more than one city might well be faced with spending thousands of dollars on software packages to keep their equipment running. Prices of $1,000 per computer are common. Dedicated technicians are also needed to monitor network equipment and issue work orders to repair failed units.
While reliable, modem computer systems cannot tolerate excess heat, dust or humidity. Heat can rapidly cause equipment deterioration. Failure of cooling fans can reduce equipment lifetime to days or hours. A single high-speed LAN (local area network) failure can cause slow system response. These and other such failures within the equipment in a server room occur routinely and can cause great disruption to a business.
Solutions do currently exist for monitoring computer networks and equipment to prevent such failures. However, these solutions are primarily targeted at high-end, very large systems such as those used by large corporations or institutions that have large budgets to support equipment monitoring. For example, Hewlett-Packard provides a high-end monitoring package with a starting price of around $250,000. In the middle tier, smaller monitoring solutions can be had for approximately $20,000. Some of these systems only permit inspection of devices on a local basis. Others permit a technician to inspect geographically diverse installations from a central console. However, all of these solutions are expensive to implement and complex and difficult to maintain and train personnel to use them.
As a result, small to medium companies having small to medium networks are left in the position of requiring a means to monitor and maintain their computer network equipment from failing while not having the resources to afford the high-priced solutions currently available. Many firms cannot afford a high-end solution or simply do not have the time and resources to train their IT personnel to learn and use complex systems. Instead, the common monitoring method in many such companies is user complaints to the IT manager to indicate when a problem has occurred. The idea is that someone in the organization will notice a failure and call for repairs before damage can be done. The reality, however, is that most IT managers have suffered some from of server room damage from excess heat or other physical phenomenon or simply just failure.
This is especially true for companies having multiple server rooms and that have concerns about routine access to each of these rooms. For example, most IT managers would like some form of remote access for determining the status of a server room. Additionally, concerns exist with current solutions regarding the manpower intensiveness of these solutions. Most network monitoring solutions can consume a full or part-time employee. The financial justification for these systems is, therefore, difficult because network equipment typically fails yearly or on a disaster basis, and the cost of recovery is seen as less than that of maintaining a full-time employee to routinely monitor the equipment.
Similar concerns exist for monitoring rack-mounted components such that individual components within a rack can be monitored remotely. Also, current monitoring solutions do not provide for video imaging of remote server locations over a network. Computer equipment is typically placed in server rooms for two reasons: security and environmental control. Remote video imaging of a server room over a network can provide for maintaining security of the equipment despite the lack of a physical presence on site.
A typical computer room can house hundreds of devices, ranging from expensive server grade computers to bridges, routers, uninterruptible power supplies and telephone equipment. A server room's environment requires monitoring because out of limit environmental variables can eventually affect the equipment in the room. For example, high temperatures, humidity (for example, from water leaks), or lack of airflow can detrimentally affect the equipment. Similarly, alarms, such as smoke and fire alarms, or the status of room openings, are important to determine. While the expense of replacing server room components if they fail is great, currently existing monitoring solutions are not cost effective for smaller-sized companies to implement despite the potential costs of such losses.
Monitoring systems are typically implemented as simple, stand-alone devices with which a user or application may configure and interact. Most appliances allow one or more users or applications to interact with them, but the user or application must typically interact with each appliance separately.
These typical monitoring systems use a centralized application (either an extension to a Network Management System, such as HP OpenView, or a proprietary server or console application). While these mechanisms can be quite effective, they introduce additional costs, through additional software, hardware, configuration, administration, and network bandwidth. Also, the central application/server often introduces a single point of failure into the environment.
Another issue with stand-alone appliances, particularly devices whose primary purpose is to monitor environmental and/or network conditions, is their vulnerability to unreported failure. Specifically, if the monitoring appliance suffers a failure, detection of the failure typically requires user interaction or polling by an expensive centralized management server. The consequence of non-detection of the failed appliance is an absence in detection of the conditions that the device was responsible for monitoring, coupled with no knowledge of the lapse in coverage.
In the case of an appliance failure, the typical stand-alone appliance lacks any mechanism for the external saving and restoring of data, specifically configuration and historical data. This can add significant overhead and opportunity for errors when a failed device is replaced, as the new device will need to be successfully reconfigured to match the failed device. Mechanisms for saving and restoring configurations for a device on external servers can be implemented, but once again introduces the problem of additional cost and points of failure.
Beyond the application to server rooms and rack mountings of network equipment, various other monitoring systems suffer from the same failures and deficiencies associated with network bandwidth and undetected sensor failure. Further, these monitoring systems may suffer from lost historical data associated with the failure of a sensor.
As such, many typical remote monitoring systems suffer from deficiencies caused by undetected sensor failure and limited communications bandwidth. Many other problems and disadvantages of the prior art will become apparent to one skilled in the art after comparing such prior art with the present invention as described herein.